Childhood Boyhood Youth by Lev Tolstoy

I read Childhood Boyhood Youth in Dutch translation (Kindertijd Jeugdjaren Jongelingschap). I had read Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Hadji Murat, The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Kreutzer Sonata years ago and I liked them. I found Tolstoy very readable. The same goes for Childhood Boyhood Youth, despite the Dutch translations being from the 1960s and therefor rather old-fashioned. But still, this is by far the Tolstoy that I liked least of all.

Though Childhood Boyhood Youth is written as fiction (the main character is called Nikolay Irtenyev), it is an apparently largely autobiographical trilogy in which Tolstoy describes his youth, from age ten till age seventeen or so. The narrator is in his late twenties, if I am not mistaken. He writes in first person singular, looking back at his youth.  Irtenyev tells about his early years at his family’s village estate a couple of days travel by carriage from Moscow, his move to Moscow for further education, the death of his mother, the remarriage of his father and his first year at university.

Of the three parts I liked Childhood best, because the main character is still likable and there is less of his increasingly annoying thought-process. Here I have immediately touched upon my main problem with this book. I found the main character increasingly annoying. He is so obsessed with “how people should behave”, with “love” (I write that in quotation marks on purpose, because it isn’t about love, but about imagined infatuations), about his elitist, superior (and in my opinion somewhat confused) views and opinions of people. Towards the end of the book I got the feeling that Nikolay started to see things in a more realistic way and he started to become aware of the differences between his own privileged status as son of a landowner and others around him, but for me that was too late to redeem him or the book. I understand that Nikolay was a product of his time, the books were first published in the 1850s, so I am willing to take that into account. I am also willing to take into account that these were the first three novels Tolstoy wrote. But even with that, I found Nikolay a stuck-up little brat.

I enjoyed the first part, Childhood, but somewhere halfway through Boyhood I started to get annoyed and by the end of Youth I was kind of glad to have finished the book. I still hold Tolstoy highly as a writer, but this book is definitely my least favorite of his. I am in the mood for some Tolstoy rereading or for other Russian classics. Too bad I don’t have any with me in Armenia, they’re all left behind in Holland.

I couldn’t find any reviews of fellow bloggers, so there are no links, but if you happen to have reviewed Childhood Boyhood Youth on your blog, be sure to leave a link in the comments and I will add it to this post.